Age Of Stupid

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All Rise...

Judge Adam Arseneau prefers the Age of Innocence.

The Charge

Why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance?

Opening Statement

You have to admire the chutzpah of a documentary that comes right out and
calls its audience stupid, but Age of Stupid is just that kind of film: a
futuristic-styled documentary with a very present message about the state of
environmental affairs, like An
Inconvenient Truth by way of a TARDIS.

Facts of the Case

The year is 2055, and the Earth has been devastated by global warming and
environmental catastrophe. A lone archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) manages a vast
storage facility of historical records, frozen animals and artistic treasures; a
time capsule of human achievement. He explores video broadcasts and recorded
footage from the early twenty-first century, trying to understand how his
ancestors could have let things get so bad.

The Evidence

Age of Stupid is not your average documentary. Set in the near future
in the year 2055, Earth has been ravaged by global warming and calamity; the
survivors of humanity lay decimated by a hellish dystopia of agony and
suffering. A lone historical archivist prepares a video journal of his
ruminations into past generations—our present—asking the rhetorical
question: Why didn't they save themselves when they had the chance? Get it? As
narrative devices go, this one is gimmicky, but effective all the same.

Setting aside the science fiction-themed plot devices for a moment, Age
of Stupid is a film about the story of six (or so) individuals from varied
walks of life and corners of the globe, living out their existence. One man
works for big oil in New Orleans and lost all his possessions during Hurricane
Katrina, yet still speaks highly about his employer and his industry. A young
brother and sister are Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, lamenting the death of
their father at the hands of Americans. A British husband and wife live an
ecologically sound existence on a farm, trying to spearhead an initiative to set
up wind turbines in the picturesque countryside of Bedfordshire, much to the
resistance of local town folks. A young woman struggles out an existence in
Nigeria in the shadow of a petroleum refinery. A hungry entrepreneurial
businessman in India is working hard to get his low-cost budget airline off the
ground, a prospective first in India to offer flights cheap enough for actual
citizens of India to partake. An elderly French glacier tour guide in Chamonix
laments the dropping ice levels in his lifetime and complains about the growing
tunnel traffic from the motorway. Age of Stupid weaves an interesting
narrative from their tales, a glimpse into their lives viewed through the tinted
glass of environmental impact, and the environment's impact on them.

On paper, these stories seem jumbled; a series of loose strings with little
in the way of a common narrative. The futuristic archivist (played by a craggy
Pete Postlethwaite) weaves the stories together like a composer, evoking a
somber song about ecological impact and carbon footprints. Age of Stupid
is extremely poignant and clear about one thing: we are destroying the planet.
We may not be conscious of it—and indeed, some of the people in the film
are doing it with the best and most noble of intentions—but we are killing
it all the same. The film requires audiences to place a bit of faith in some of
its assumptions to get the full effect, so the less you question the reasoning
and methodology, the happier you'll be as an audience member.

Though its message may not always stay quite on mark, Age of Stupid
lands one point home easily: our societal dependency on oil will ultimately
herald the downfall of our culture. In fact, oil is the main narrative strand
that ties all these tales together: the oil needed for airplanes, selling wind
farms in alternative to oil, oil as the motivator to invade Iraq, oil companies
destroying Nigerian villages, an oil worker ravaged by the fury of nature in New
Orleans, oil-powered vehicles ruining the picturesque beauty of the French Alps.
Some of these connections are extremely clear and vivid, while others are
opaque. All six tales are good in that audiences will want to hear their
stories, but not all the stories seem to jive with the underlying narrative of
the documentary, like square pegs being crammed into round holes.

Narrative issues aside, there is a lot to admire about this plucky
independent documentary. Age of Stupid paid for its production costs
through crowd-funding, selling "shares" of the film upfront with
returns to be paid upon successful release of the film. The global premiere of
the film was broadcast from a solar-powered cinema tent. A coordinated global
launch of the film reached over one million viewers, simultaneously broadcast in
over 63 countries—a new world record. A groundbreaking screening model
allows anyone to purchase a license to hold a screening of the film (no set
price for admission) with the screeners themselves keeping the profits. The film
even helped set in motion a political campaign to persuade governments and
corporations to reduce their collective carbon footprints in 2010 by 10 percent.
Age of Stupid even calculates its own carbon footprint and discloses this
unpleasantness openly at the end of the film.

Director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) has created a passionate and
intriguing film and a frustratingly oblique documentary, simultaneously. The
moral of the film is intrinsically correct: climate change, global warming, oil
dependencies—all serious issues to be sure, but the methodology and logic
used by the film to reach its conclusions is so bewildering and convoluted as to
rebuke the very point the film tries to make. Age of Stupid is like a kid
who hands in a brilliant solution to a complex math problem on a page full of
scribbles, fallacies, and gibberish; a broken equation that somehow, almost by
random happenstance, lands exactly the right answer to the problem. How do you
grade something like that?

Assembled from a hodgepodge mix of news archival footage, on-location shoots
and CGI futuristic landscapes of apocalyptic carnage, the visual quality of the
DVD varies by source material. The CGI effects are admittedly crude and
low-budget—some border on laughable—but they serve the purpose of
the narrative well enough. On-location footage is clear with a natural, balanced
color palate and a clean image. Given the relative low-budget production, the
filmmakers did an excellent job on this title. Audio comes in a Dolby Digital
5.1 Surround transfer, which does a good job. The on-location audio recording
comes in clean and clear, and rear channels pick up environmental details well
enough. The audio isn't a knockout, but a solid score and music from Radiohead
and Depeche Mode help somewhat.

Age of Stupid goes for the gusto with special features. Shot over the
course of four years, the cast and crew have amassed a massive amount of
supplements for this DVD release. The two-disc set contains five hours worth of
extras, if you believe the packaging material. Deep breath, here we go: a
50-minute making-of documentary, eight extended interviews, a crew commentary,
trailers, ambush footage harassing U.K. ministers, eight deleted scenes, eight
short films about climate change, and all manner of supplementary videos are
crammed into this package. It is quite comprehensive.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Age of Stupid is no dummy, but the convoluted plotlines and gimmicky
narration distract needlessly from its premise of ecological change and
accountability. I wish Age of Stupid could articulate its point without
the use of the omnipresent, futuristic narrator. A slick marketing gimmick to be
sure, but it just totally wrecks the subtlety of the film, like a jackhammer in
a dentist's office.

Closing Statement

The power in a film like Age of Stupid is not in the movie itself, but
the conversation and dialogue about environmental issues created in its wake.
It's easy to find fault with the methodology of Age of Stupid, but
impossible to criticize the heartfelt urgency of its message.